SEARCH RESULTS

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the influence of students’ attitudes towards mathematics, mathematics self-concept and socio-economic status on their performance in Timss mathematics test. It also examined the relevance of the different schools’ characteristics for the prediction of students’ performance. We analyzed data related to 3997 Italian students of 170 schools, a representative sample of students in eight grade school, that participated to the Timss 2007. A multilevel analysis was conducted to distinguish how much of the variability of performance was due to student characteristics and/or to characteristics of schools and of the territorial context in which schools are located. The results showed that self-concept in mathematics helps to explain the differences in performance in mathematics. Further, the socio-economic status, at school level, contributed to the prediction of the performance in mathematics. Furthermore, in the Italian context, significant differences in performance depending on geographic area were evidenced.

The present article focuses on two main issues, metacognition and group work, and on the relationship between them in adult learning and presents the results of a research activity conducted with 14 adult students enrolled in the Faculty of Education at Roma Tre University. It represents the second phase of a wider research that hypothesized a positive relation between metacognition (or secondlevel skills) and reading comprehension. This hypothesis was tested out in two subsequent steps, the first one devoted to solving individual reading comprehension exercises, the second one to thinking-aloud interviews (Angelini, 2010). The results showed that the best readers were aware of their meta-cognitive knowledge and able to manage their metacognitive control processes, some of which seem to be totally absent in the weak readers. Afterwards, the same respondents were involved in a further activity aiming at verifying if cooperative learning could have an empowering effect especially on the weak readers. The results of this second phase are discussed in relation with those obtained in the previous phase.

Gabriella Agrusti It is widely recognized that prior knowledge plays a fundamental role in reading comprehension and in meaning construction. Generally, readers who are able to identify the typical structure of a text in a genre or to locate its content within the appropriate domain are said to better recall the ideas conveyed by the text. The text itself is a textus, a complex texture that includes rhetorical patterns on different directories (spatial, temporal, figurative), a network structure that offers several ways of integrating information based on relationships among its components. Poor readers are unlikely to make inferences to link these pieces of information into a coherent representation. Would the introduction of an image comprehension strategy improve students’ reading comprehension of verbal texts? In this article the results of a research project carried out in Italy on adult readers, with particular reference to inferential processes in narrative anachronies, will be presented.